Review: Once Upon a Dream

Once Upon a Dream

Once Upon a Time

222

Forum

Jcink

90

Intermediate

3-5 paragraphs

New posts every 1-3 days.

All

This RPG follows the general gist of the tv show, although it does allow players to shape the futures of canon characters as they wish.

It's nice to see someone using green in a layout without making it too overbearing or hidieous. The combination of different shades of green and cream/light yellows works really well. A few suggestions though; the hover over colour is neon green and is very bright. I'd suggest toning it down a few shades. The only other issue is the font size for posts; it's tiny! As the saying goes; the internet doesn't run out of paper.

Easy to follow, had no problems finding the essential topics and areas.

To be honest it is lacking. Starting out a plot summary with 'if you've seen the show, you know' isn't a good idea simply because not everyone is up to date with the show. Likewise, if you live outside the US you're likely to be on a totally different season to other roleplayers. As a fan of the show who is not up to date I would stop reading right now because I have no idea how many spoilers your site is going to give me, just through browsing it. When you're running an RPG based on a fandom, especially one that continues to be updated such as book series' or tv shows, you need to state exactly when your RPG is set. I realise that the RPG has a fluid time system in place, but it still needs to have some sort of stability in terms of plot. Perhaps it would be easier to have a 'recent events' summary to do this, which would work well with the fluid time system.

Most of the information under the plot topic is also more RPG related rather than specific to the plot. I would suggest moving all the fluid time information to a topic labelled as 'timeline' or 'create your own story'.

There isn't much beside the basics; rules, plot, canon list, etc. It gives the RPG a very half-baked feel.

There's some amusing humour at the end of the rules, which is then followed by this: "Emma Swan and Mr. Gold have made the determination that if you decide to quit the board, so do we. i.e. You leave, We leave. There is no negotiation. This is final."

I'm not quite sure whether that is meant seriously or as a joke, and it really does give the wrong impression to potential members. It sounds as though the staff team are saying that if people quit the game - which is inevitable in any RPG - they will leave as well. Maybe it isn't meant that way but to a visitor viewing the site it could be taken that way.

Guest friendly area with several helpful topics already available to members. Unable to comment on staff response time and attitude as there are not any questions from guests to use as an example. There's also a topic called 'ask a staff' for anyone, including, members to use to speak to the staff so that queries don't get lost in the cbox.

Profile template that needs to be completed and reposted for staff approval. A writing sample of at least 200 words is required. There does not appear to be any word limit or idea of how much detail is needed per section of the forum. The 'History' portion can just be a link from a wiki/else where on the web.

Images seem to be turned off for guests so none of the images in information topics, such as canon list, shows up. Might want to check that out

Also something small but terribly annoying; some type of coding in your layout keeps refreshing the page and means that when you try to hit the 'back' button it doesn't change page. I'm not a coding expert so no idea what it is, but if you're trying to browse a site quickly it's very annoying. I'm using Firefox so it may just be browser related.

Looking through the rp posts there's a lot of joint posts (RP posts done over IM and then posted on a forum) and some of them don't specify who posted what. I'd suggest getting members to always put a character name as a sub-title or "posted by...." before/beneath each post so it's more visible that 2 + players were involved. On topics where this hasn't been done it looks like one player is just posting to themselves and this may make some visitors think that the site isn't as active as it is, or that they'll be expected to post to themselves a lot.